


I'll Still Destroy You - Alternate Ending (Fan-made)

by antebellum13



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Alternate Ending, F/M, Fanfiction of Fanfiction, I really couldn't help myself, Post-Canon, Post-Dragon Age: Inquisition - Trespasser DLC, Suicidal Ideation, Trigger Warning In Notes, Yours_Truly_Commander_Shepard is amazing, fully visible in post-note for mobile users, homicidal ideaton, hoverable in pre-note, one final fucking victory for lavellan, they are 100 percent not in love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-26
Updated: 2021-02-26
Packaged: 2021-03-17 12:42:20
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,368
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29717346
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/antebellum13/pseuds/antebellum13
Summary: An alternate ending that struck me as I read this devastatingly haunting and beautiful work by Yours_Truly_Commander_Shepard. If the Inquisitor had dual tricks up her sleeve when she and Solas finally come face to face in the waking world.
Relationships: Female Inquisitor/Solas (Dragon Age), Female Lavellan/Solas, Fen'Harel | Solas/Female Lavellan, Fen'Harel/Female Lavellan (Dragon Age), Fen'Harel/Inquisitor/Solas (Dragon Age)
Comments: 1
Kudos: 9





	I'll Still Destroy You - Alternate Ending (Fan-made)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Yours_Truly_Commander_Shepard](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Yours_Truly_Commander_Shepard/gifts).
  * Inspired by [I'll Still Destroy You](https://archiveofourown.org/works/29704059) by [Yours_Truly_Commander_Shepard](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Yours_Truly_Commander_Shepard/pseuds/Yours_Truly_Commander_Shepard). 



> Copy/paste of Yours_Truly_Commander_Shepard's original words up to the asterisks, and then it changes into the alternate ending. If you haven't read hers yet, it is necessary to read it first before reading this one or there will be zero context. [Please go here to read it!](https://archiveofourown.org/works/29704059)
> 
> ! **TRIGGER WARNING!**! <\-- Only mouse-over this text if you need to know the trigger, as the trigger is also a spoiler. <3 If you are on mobile and cannot hover, scroll to the bottom notes to see the trigger. Thank you for helping me preserve the twist by keeping it out of the tags!

It was a near thing for him. A nearer thing for her. He slept for a week after he was healed. He heard from his agents that she slept for even longer after they dumped her on Magister Pavus’ doorstep, where she might expect to enjoy the tender care of her devoted followers in her convalescence. The poison she had used was a Tevinter one; Solas thought he knew where she’d procured it. 

He drafted written orders to pour the same into the punch bowl at the next meeting of the Tevinter resistance and wipe Houses Pavus and Tilani from the face of the earth. He had not yet delivered the orders. He was not ruled by his passions. He would send them if it still seemed like the right thing to do when his hands no longer shook with rage every time he thought of it. 

It had been very close to the end for both of them. She had almost won. She had almost been the place where they both ended. 

A month later, he thought his anger cooled enough to seek the Inquisitor’s dreams again. His agents had lost her trail after she left the ruins of Qarinus. None of them could track her through the woods, and she’d gone alone, no doubt off to plot other inventive methods of his demise. Meanwhile, he took Vyrantium and purged the Inquisition spies from his organization there. 

When Solas finally found her dreams again, she was back in the woods of the Free Marches. It was winter, and the birch tree drooped thin white branches over the silvered water of the forest pool. She sat on the bare ground, shredding the dead grass in her hands. She no longer pretended to be her former self. The long, dark hair was cut short and utilitarian; her face was bare; her hand was absent. She must have faced herself in a mirror. 

When the Inquisitor saw him, she did not smile or frown. She tipped her head back, baring the long column of her throat, and she waited. 

“So,” the Inquisitor said. “You lived.” 

He sneered at her. “Against your best efforts. Did you imagine otherwise?” 

She shrugged, looking down at the water. “There was a chance it would be fatal for you but not for me.” Her tone was cool, contemplative of lessons learned. She would try again a different way. 

He stalked across the snow to her, looming over her like the beast of Dalish legend. He wrapped a palm around her throat and forced her to meet his eyes. Her pupils contracted. He has never put his hands on her before except when he has been speared naked inside her. He let her feel the pinprick of his clawed gloves until he nearly broke the skin.

“Did you think to save yourself with mithridatism?” he hissed. She had very nearly died. She might have died when he brought her into the Fade. She would have died if no spirit of Hope had been willing to come to him and heal her, as lit with the opposite emotion as he had been. 

“No,” she replied, calmly as though he were not half an inch from strangling her. 

“Then what if your forces had not arrived soon enough with the antidote?” he spat into her face. Anyone else had been at least an hour away, and she had been mere moments from dying. 

“There is no antidote to that poison,” she told him. “And the healers assured me it could not be cured.” She shrugged, the movement bunching her skin under his gauntlet. “It seems they were wrong.” 

Dying had felt like slipping beneath the ice. He sometimes felt like he would never be warm again. Like there was a shard of frozen glass lodged deep in his chest where he’d never carve it out. 

“You did not even know if I would drink too,” he yelled into her face. 

She smiled at him, the expression not meeting her liquid brown eyes. “But I know you, Fen’Harel.” 

*****************

He snarled as he let go of her throat to begin tearing at her clothes, but she grabbed his wrist, both gentle and insistent. 

“Did you think death was my only plan? Against you, Fen’Harel? There was the barest sliver of a chance we would live to see another day. Did you think the _timing_ of our meeting was mere chance?”

His brow knit in momentary confusion, the anger not completely gone from the set of his jaw. His eyes flickered to her lips where a wicked grin had begun to spread, and then to her eyes, where the fathomless victory of this final secret stirred. His heart clenched painfully somewhere in the depths of his stomach where it had dropped.

“ _You_ ⎯” He stopped, his mind unable to cope with this stunned revelation. _No_. She would not be so selfish, would she? And yet she had been willing to kill herself in order to kill him. No, not even to kill him. She knew she might fail while her own life was forfeit. She _was_ selfish enough.

He was on her before she could react, pressing her body into the soft earth beneath her as his hands sought the bare flesh of her abdomen. He pressed there, sending his magic into her very cells. He did not find a heartbeat, not so early, but _⎯_ yes. There. The smallest fraction of a pinpoint of life, planted firmly within her.

He was pacing before her prone body within an instant, rage filling him until he was certain he would combust. He turned on his heel to face her where she had propped herself up on her hands.

“You would do this to an innocent? A doom as certain as your own?” he spat, his voice shaking with uncontrolled vitriol.

“Will you be the one to bring it to my doorstep? To end this life before it has begun? Or will you wait until he has taken air into his lungs to end the world? Or perhaps you’ll allow him to grow to manhood and then destroy him and his own family? His children? Their children? At what point is death acceptable? At what point is sacrifice justifiable? If you wanted me dead, I would be dead.” She was on her feet now, mere inches from where he was barely holding himself together, his chest heaving as he stared down at her maddeningly calm visage. Her fingers found his jaw, cupping it with gentleness as opposite to his current state as oil was to water. 

“Will you kill me, Fen’Harel?”

Nausea rolled over him. He was a monster, that much was certain, set in stone long before he had ever met the Inquisitor. Thousands of innocents lay dead around him in the millennia of battles he had both led and fought in, their broken and lifeless bodies as clear in his mind as though he had only just stepped over them in his journey to allow more to die in the name of the greater good. But could he perform this final monstrous act?

“You gambled on that which there is no certainty of success. You do not know if it will take, not even now, not even months from now,” he said, his voice deceptively even over the flames still boiling the blood within him.

She smiled again as her hand found the back of his neck. “It would not be a gamble if it were certain. And if it doesn’t last? Then your choice will be that much simpler, won’t it?” Her lips found him then, as aggressive and greedy as the hand that tore at his clothing.

“Why did you save me, Solas?” she murmured in a momentary pause of her lips against his.

He did not answer; instead, he dragged her back down to the ground.

Why did he save her? It was not love. He could not love her. And she could not love him.

_No_ , he told himself as he took her again and again there on the ground in the Fade. He _hated_ her.

They could not do this to each other if they were in love.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so much for inspiring me to write this, Yours_Truly! I really loved the work so much and I don't often get the urge to write something in my chaos of a life, so I'm grateful for the muse. <3
> 
> TRIGGER WARNING (for those who cannot hover over on mobile): Implied pregnancy.


End file.
